Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Eight

The uniform was less itchy than Marshall had expected.

He had grumbled like high hell when his father had tossed it at him upon his arrival, opting to fold his arms and demand that they throw him in a cell instead. General Shu had stared at him blandly, as had all his men, as if Marshall were a child throwing a tantrum in a candy store. It had seemed rather silly then. To stand around and waste time, achieving nothing meaningful save for being a big headache. It was only that if he remained petulant, he could fool himself into believing that someone was coming for him. That the city might stop fighting, that the gangs would go back to normal, that the White Flowers would storm the place, waving for him to hurry and come home.

But Marshall had been hiding out for months. The White Flowers thought he was dead. The city had given up on him. There was no use digging his heels in and being difficult.

Marshall inspected the cuff of his sleeve, his attention drifting from the Nationalist currently speaking. This was General Shu’s residence, and his father and twenty-odd men were presently convening around the heavy wooden table in the council room, letting Marshall listen too, as if he were here to learn. There were no more seats available at the table, so Marshall stood by the door instead, leaning on the fraying wallpaper and eyeing the ceiling, wondering if the creaking he heard late at night from his bedroom one floor above was the footsteps of his father, pacing the council room at odd hours.

“Érzi.”

Marshall jumped. He had zoned out. When his eyes focused on the table again, the men were clearing out, and his father was staring at him, his hands behind his back.

“Come sit a minute.”

At the very least, Marshall hadn’t missed anything. He had heard all he needed in the other meetings. The Communists needed to go. Shanghai was theirs. The Northern Expedition would succeed. Blah, blah, blah—

“No campaigns to rush off to?” Marshall remarked, dropping into a seat.

General Shu didn’t seem amused. The door closed after the final Nationalist, and Marshall’s father returned to the table, selecting the seat two away from Marshall.

“You are not being forced to remain here.”

Marshall snorted. “Given the soldiers stationed around this house, you and I have very different definitions of what being forced means.”

“Mere precautions.” General Shu rapped his knuckles on the table surface. Marshall’s eyes shot to the sound immediately, stiffening at the move. It was how his father used to get his attention at the dinner table on the rare occasions he came to visit. Visit, as if it weren’t his own family. “You are young. You don’t know what is best yet. What I must do is keep you within the most ideal conditions, even if I must compel it, and only then can you—”

“Stop,” Marshall pleaded. They had had enough low-toned, mean-spirited back-and-forth yesterday. He was hardly in the mood to start hashing out again how exactly a childhood kept out in the countryside qualified as an “ideal condition.” “Get to the point. What am I doing here? Why do you care?”

For several long moments, General Shu said nothing. Then: “This country is going to war. I was content to let you run yourself wild as a gangster when there seemed no harm, but it is different now. The city is dangerous. Your place is here.”

Marshall resisted the urge to laugh out loud. Not in humor—in belly-deep, stinking resentment.

“I survived as a gangster in Shanghai for years. I can manage, thanks.”

“No.” General Shu turned to his side, looking across the top of the chair between them. “You didn’t, did you? At the merest provocation, the Scarlet heir asked you to play dead, and you did.”

Marshall was so tired of this being some crime. What was wrong with hiding? What was wrong with retreating and lying low, if only to survive and recoup, if only to fight another day?

“I bear no ill will to the Scarlet heir.”

“Maybe you should. She is reckless and volatile. She is everything wrong with this city.”

“I ask again,” Marshall repeated through gritted teeth. “Is there a point to this?”

His father could say that it was for his own good. He could pull up the city’s every obituary, could show Marshall the sheer numbers that had been lost in these recent few years to the blood feud, a bullet through the chest for no reason other than wandering too close to the wrong territory. It didn’t matter. It was all an excuse.

The Nationalists shunned the imperial monarchy, but when they marched into this city and took it, they acted just as conquering kings and empires did. Different titles, the same idea. Power was only long-lasting if it were a reign, and reigns needed heirs. Marshall’s father never cared to find him when he was a child surviving off scraps. It was only now, when appearances became key, that he remembered Marshall existed.

General Shu sighed, dropping the brewing argument. Instead, he reached into his jacket, his hands brushing past the flashing medals pinned to his lapel, and retrieved a small, square card.

“I divulge this information because I care.” The card landed upon the table, faceup. “There is an execution order from the Kuomintang on the Montagovs.”

In a flash, Marshall shot to his feet, lunging for the small card and scanning the telegram. The stroke of midnight. No prisoners left alive.

“Call it off,” Marshall demanded. His voice turned to steel. He hated when he sounded like this. It wasn’t him. “Call it off now.”

“I can delay it,” General Shu said evenly. “I can continue delaying it. But I cannot call it off. No one has that power alone.”

Marshall’s fists tightened. He imagined marching out right now, through the line of soldiers, past the tall, tall walls bordering the mansion. . . .

“So you tell me as if I should be grateful?” he asked. “You tell me as if I should bless the Kuomintang that they are only soon to be dead?”

General Shu was not bothered by Marshall’s outburst. He never was. “I tell you so you realize what is left out there. Your former gangsters whose lives hang on a thread. Your Scarlet heir under her father’s thumb, your White Flower heir with nothing left under his command. What remains for you? The only place where you are needed is here. As the Kuomintang leadership flock into the city, as the number of meetings rise, as they look to see where the next generation of capable leaders may stem from—you are needed.”

The telegram crinkled under Marshall’s fingers. He was biting the inside of his cheeks so hard that he could taste the metallic tang of blood. The White Flowers were crumbling. The White Flowers hardly qualified as a gang any longer, never mind an empire that could exert power against the city.

“You cannot help your friends by running out,” General Shu continued. “But you can help by staying with me. I am willing to train you in your studies, your potential for leadership. I am willing to bring you up the chain of command, to be my son in proper public view.”

A Nationalist prodigy. An obedient son, one who had stayed in the house that day he found his mother dead, who hadn’t fled the very second he envisioned living only with his stranger of a father. He wondered how much of his past he needed to erase, whether it was his history as a gangster or his history flirting with boys that would be more of a scandal.

“Do you promise?” Marshall asked hoarsely. “We can save my friends? You will help me?”

You will not abandon me? You will not leave me to fend for myself?

General Shu nodded firmly, rising to his feet too. “We can be a family again, Marshall, so long as you do not fight me. We could do grand things, make grand change.”

Marshall released the telegram, let it flutter back upon the table.

“I will keep your friends safe,” General Shu finally said. “I will protect them to the very best of my ability, but I will need your help. Don’t you want a purpose? Don’t you want to stop running?”

“Yes,” Marshall replied quietly. “Yes, I would like that.”

“Good,” General Shu said. He dropped both his hands on Marshall’s shoulders, giving a squeeze. It almost felt fatherly. It almost felt gentle. “Very good.”

If Roma looked at one more map, he feared he would fry his brain.

With a huff, he pushed all the papers out of the way, dragging a hand through his hair and mussing his careful combing beyond repair.

A mess. Everything was a goddamned mess, and he couldn’t begin to imagine how the White Flowers could survive this. His father kept himself locked in his office. The other powerful men in the White Flowers were either mysteriously missing or had outright signaled their intent to disappear. It hadn’t been like this immediately after the takeover, but it seemed the more time passed, the clearer it was that there was no reverse button. Their contacts in the foreign concessions were lost; their agreements with militia forces across all territory had collapsed.

Lord Montagov had very few options. Either gather his numbers together and wage outright battle on two groups of politicians—Communist and Nationalist alike—or tuck tail and disintegrate. The first was not even in the realm of possibility, so the second it needed to be. If only his father would actually open his door when Roma knocked. So many years of Roma trying to prove himself, and for what? They would have ended up here anyway, a city in flames, whether Roma behaved or not.

“Roma!”

Roma sat upright, stretching his body so he could peer through his half-open door. It was late at night, the light at his desk flickering at random. Something was wrong with the wires in the house, and he suspected it was because the electric factories and power lines across the city were still sitting in ruins.

“Benedikt?” Roma called back. “Is that you?”

His lamp made a sound. With a suddenness that almost gave Roma a fright, the bulb went out completely. At the same time, footsteps were thudding up the stairs and down the hall, and when Benedikt burst through Roma’s door in a complete rush, Roma’s immediate instinct was to assume his cousin had had an epiphany for Marshall’s rescue.

Then Benedikt slumped to rest his hands on his knees, his face so pale as to look sickly, and Roma bolted to his feet. Not an epiphany.

“Are you okay?” he demanded.

“Have you heard?” Benedikt gasped. He staggered forward, looking as if he would fall.

“Heard what?” In half-darkness, his sight guided only by the light of the hallway, Roma smacked his hands along his cousin’s arms. He found no wounds. “Are you injured?”

“So you haven’t heard,” Benedikt said. Something about his tone brought Roma’s eyes up, snapping to attention. “There are confirmed reports. Nationalists, Communists, Scarlets—they’re all talking about it. I wager it was not supposed to leak past the Scarlet circles, but it did.”

“About what?” Roma resisted the urge to shake his cousin, if only because color still had not returned to Benedikt’s pale cheeks. “Benedikt, what are you talking about?”

Benedikt did stumble to the floor then, landing hard into a sitting position. “Juliette is dead,” he whispered. “Dead by her own hand.”

Juliette was not dead.

She was, however, at risk of collapsing from overexertion, given how hard she had run across the city. In an effort to hurry as fast as possible, she had possibly twisted her ankle and blown out her lungs. Perhaps lungs did not blow out so easily, but the tightness in her chest said otherwise. Affording herself a mere minute of rest, Juliette pulled her hat low over her face and leaned against the exterior wall of White Flower headquarters, heaving for breath behind the building.

She had managed to push the purge to four in the morning. Any later than that and her ruse could fall through if the Nationalists demanded further explanation.

The plan had unfolded so smoothly that Juliette just knew something was going to go wrong. She had succeeded in sneaking into her father’s empty office, succeeded in forging a letter with his handwriting, and stamped it in his name. To the Chinese, a man’s personal stamp was as good as an unforgeable signature, never mind how insensible that was given Lord Cai locked his in a drawer Juliette knew how to open. She had succeeded in pressing down the ink, in folding up the letter with its contents brief and succinct: My daughter is dead, a dagger to her own heart. While I understand the importance of revolution, please allow all Scarlets to mourn until daybreak before any action is taken. She had even succeeded in prodding the unconscious messenger awake and threatening him at knifepoint to take the letter and deliver it to the same Nationalist who had sent Lord Cai the last correspondence, promising that she would peel his skin like a sliced pear if he tattled about Juliette being alive.

The moment the messenger ran out the door, Juliette charged for the nearest phone. She needed to warn Roma: warn him that there was an order for his execution, and warn him that she was very much alive, no matter what the streets were about to say.

That was when Juliette remembered the lines were down.

“Tā mā de!” She tried, of course. Tried calling and calling in case the operator centers had one or two workers mingling around. The line refused to connect. There was not a single messenger around the house to run a warning to the Montagovs; they were all out, dispersed across the city, lying in wait like live snakes in tall grass.

Now it was already past midnight. She had spared precious time in packing first: jewelry and weapons and cash shoved into a burlap sack slung around her shoulders. If she was going to run, she was going to run with all the means possible to survive. Who was to say how long it would be before she could come back? Who was to say if Shanghai would ever heal enough for her to come back at all?

Juliette slunk around the side of the building, then took a sharp turn in her route, hurrying into another thin alley. She was not walking toward the front door of headquarters; instead, she needed to get to the building behind their central block. From above, the darkness of the clouds beat down as if it were oppressive heat, so heavy that the lone streetlamp some paces away seemed like the only salvation for miles.

Juliette came to a stop outside the other building. Listening for sound and hearing nothing, she knocked.

The shuffle of footsteps came immediately, like the occupant inside had been waiting for someone. When the door opened and a flood of light bled into the heavy night, a woman was blinking at Juliette—young, Chinese, wearing an apron dusted with flour.

This used to be how Juliette snuck into the Montagov house in the few times she had dared it. It had been years since her last attempt; by now the people living behind the central block had long moved, bringing in strangers for replacements.

“Which apartment are you in?” Juliette asked, not bothering with pleasantries.

“I—what?”

“Which apartment?” Juliette repeated. “You don’t occupy the whole building, do you?”

The woman blinked again, then with delay, shook her head. “I am only this floor,” she said, gesturing behind her. “Some renters in between, and at the top is my elderly father—”

Juliette withdrew a clump of money and pressed it into the woman’s hands. “Let me through, would you? I just need to use his window.”

“I—”

After a long second of staring at the sum of money in her hands, the woman made a stammering noise and let Juliette into the building.

“Thank you,” Juliette breathed. She spared a glance over her shoulder before stepping through the threshold. “If you’re waiting for someone to come home tonight, I urge you to stay in. Don’t leave, understand me?”

The woman nodded, her eyebrows knitting together. Juliette didn’t wait for further invitation—she surged forward, trekking up the nearest set of stairs that appeared. All the buildings in these parts of the city were built in a labyrinthine manner, windowpanes shooting out from staircase banisters and rooms leading into rooms leading into other rooms, which held the next set of stairs up.

Juliette finally found the floor she wanted, her memory withstanding the years. When she eased open the door into the dark bedroom, she found an elderly man sleeping in his bed, the curtains to his window undrawn, a flood of silver illuminating his frail form. Careful not to let her shoes click on the hardwood floor, Juliette crept to the window and lifted it, shivering with the gust of wind.

The back of this building was directly facing the back of White Flower headquarters. And they were so close to one another that when Juliette reached out, she easily slid open Roma’s window and climbed over. For one exhale, her body was dangling four floors aboveground, one wrong twitch away from falling and shattering into pieces. Then she had ducked through the window, softly touching down in Roma Montagov’s bedroom.

Juliette looked around. The room was empty.

Where the hell is he?

“Roma,” Juliette called softly, like he might possibly be hiding. When there was no response, she cursed viciously. Think, think. Where could he have gone?

Juliette hurried to the door and pulled it open quietly, eyeing the empty hallway. There was considerable noise coming from downstairs, like White Flowers were still entertaining themselves despite the late hour. For a moment Juliette simply did not know what to do, short of slipping into the hallway and closing Roma’s bedroom door behind her, her heart pounding a crescendo in her chest. Then she turned to her side and found a small face watching her from the crack of a shoe cupboard.

“Oh my God,” Juliette whispered in Russian. “Alisa Nikolaevna, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Alisa climbed out of the small cupboard, straightening to her full height. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Juliette reared back. “How did you know?”

“How did I know . . . that you were dead?” Alisa asked. “I heard Benedikt bring the news in. Roma ran out as soon as he heard.”

Oh. Oh, no, no, no—

“Where did he go?” Juliette breathed. “Alisa, where did he go?”

Alisa shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking in the cupboard since then. I was about to mourn you too, you know. It was only ten minutes ago.”

Juliette pressed her fist to her mouth, thinking fast. Within the house, there came a chiming sound, and she was willing to bet that it was signaling the hour: one o’clock, the new morning.

“Listen to me.” Juliette kneeled suddenly, so that she wasn’t looming over Alisa. She clamped her hands on the girl’s shoulders, her grip tight. “Alisa, there’s a purge coming. I need you to go downstairs and warn everyone, warn as many people as you can. Then I need you to pack whatever you cannot bear to live without and come with me.”

Alisa stared forward. Her eyes were as big as a doe’s, amber brown and filled with concern. “Come with you?” she echoed. “To where?”

“To find your brother,” Juliette answered. “Because we’re leaving the city.”